Disliking Like!

I remember Peter, a friend of mine ridiculing me big time when I finally joined Facebook after quite a long resistance to join the bandwagon. I’d been blindly loyal to Orkut and was totally not ready to accept the fact that the world was migrating to FB! Nevertheless, it had to happen and I was pretty happy when it did.

Facebook turned out to be much better in terms of usability and features and not long after I moved to FB I had to relocate physically to Middle East where Orkut anyways was banned. Status updates, photo uploads and a bunch of activities followed. Among all these there is one specific feature I find totally disturbing! The ‘Like’ feature of FB.

I’ve to admit I had been a user of this feature to express my interest for some of the pictures or videos posted by friends or otherwise. I’ve been receiving a few ‘likes’ as well for the photos or status messages I post once a while. I do remember a few months back when I first told my sweetheart I wish there was an option to disable the ‘like’ feature in FB. It was beginning to annoy me since every time I upload a picture or post a message there was a flurry of activity in my account. 9/10 of these will be a ‘like’ by someone among my contacts.

The futility of this activity is what makes me think what exactly is the point? I really wonder if the person who ‘likes’ something really mean it. If they do, why not spent an extra few seconds and say that instead of being a lethargic victim to the technology marathon?! It seems to me more like a routine job being done rather than expressing an earnest opinion.

There have also been instances when the pop ups for ‘like’ gets hurled at you as if it was your mistake to post that status or upload that picture! It felt more like being fired at by a machine gun. I even wonder if these people have devised some sort of an algorithm to generate the likes as soon as an activity appears!

Maybe I’m old fashioned, maybe this is what I am, but I love it when people make an effort to tell you what they liked about something, rather than finish the job because you’ve an option there to do so by the slightest movement of the cursor!

Bottom Line: Communicate; do not constrain!